YouTube Analytics of My Top 3 Videos

When you’re running a business, you have to stay on top of your YouTube analytics. You have to be able to measure properly so that you know when you’re successful.

I’m going to go through my most popular videos, and we’re going beyond views, subscribers, and watch time.

These are the questions I’m looking at:

Why did these videos do well?

Where did the traffic come from?

How are people watching?

How much of the video is being watched?

Paying attention to these analytics gives you the insight to create new content that you know your audience will love. If it worked to get you traffic in the first place, you can replicate that strategy and bring more traffic to your site. #nobrainer

Let’s dive into my YouTube analytics.

The first thing I’m looking at is the lifetime analytics of the video. From there, there’s a high spike in views in the beginning and then it drops off. Why? Because it takes time to gain traffic from the various traffic sources.

Even if something doesn’t do well in the beginning, you still need to have a great title, tags, thumbnail, and description. You never know when the momentum is going to happen.

When I go look at this year’s analytics on this same video, I see that the average watch time is shorter than the length of the video, and that’s because it’s a tutorial. People are skipping around to get to the juicy parts!

I also like to look at where people are watching. My analytics show me that people are watching on the YouTube watch page. Why? Because people are discovering the video on YouTube.

How are people watching this video? I like to look at these analytics on the traffic sources page of YouTube analytics. (Look for this button in the sidebar.)

In the last year, there’s a lot happening in the “suggested videos” section. This page tells me a lot about the channels that refer my video to their audience. This gives me opportunities and data that I would have never known about.

You can see the names of the channels who bring you traffic. This is a great opportunity to check out who is the face behind that channel and potentially reach out to collaborate with them.

I also like to look at audience retention. This shows you what happens to the audience at any given point of the video. Are they sticking around to the end? Are they bouncing around?

In this video tutorial, you see a dip in my analytics because people are skipping around to get the exact content they want. Obviously, you don’t want the dips, but it’s understandable in tutorials.

If I were going back to re-record this video, I would refer to the Authority Video Formula and get to the content sooner. Looking at this retention gives you a lot of information. You want the average percentage viewed to be around 50%, and if your percentage is less, you know that you need to tighten up your videos.

Look at the retention on an individual video basis and look at the retention of the channel as a whole.

The best YouTubers pay attention to their analytics. Are you analyzing?

What does it mean to get external search?

I get traffic from Google and YouTube search. (Isn’t it nice when platforms play well together?) When you click on “YouTube search,” you can see the exact search terms people use. That data is incredibly important because this invaluable data tells you what people actually want. That gives you so much insight into the thought process of your audience.

These are real people who are typing into search. This is a hack to learn about what they are typing in.

This video is different than the first because it got a lot of traffic in the beginning when Adobe launched their new product and then the momentum tapered off. A little while later, the video started getting a whole bunch of traffic all of a sudden.

First, I got a lot of traffic from suggested videos, which was linked to search terms. There was a trend of “free video editors” but my video was suggested to those viewers, which gives me a lot of fun ideas of video to create in the future.

YouTube search sent me traffic, and when I dig in here, I’ve given the search terms that people use to find this video. Always know where people are coming from, especially if it’s the direct result of a search term. Knowing what you did right is great because then you can replicate that strategy to recreate this success.

I made this video with my friend, Austin Evans. Austin has a significant YouTube following, so you can see that he sent me a lot of traffic. (Thanks, friend!)

YouTube search has given this video a lot of attention in regards to search terms. There are some other videos from Austin’s channel that are sending me viewers too. There’s something happening with the watch activity + metadata that is signaling YouTube to suggest the videos to new viewers.

Hopefully, you have a better understanding of what’s happening in the analytics and what I’m doing to plan for the future based on what the data is telling me that people want. There is so much information in the data that will make you better. If you avoid your analytics, you aren’t going to be that good of a YouTube creator. There’s too much information there that can push you forward to be even more awesome.